Re: Things like budget approvals (do I need a table for booleans)?

[Rick James]

There is no simple 'right' answer.

Do you need to know when it was approved? By whom? Can approval be revoked? Do you need to track the when and who of that, too? If Yes to some of those, then a separate table is possibly better. Revoking approval probably needs the extra table.

Or you could put the when and who of the approval in the main table. At that point, you could get rid of the boolean; instead use "AND who IS NOT NULL".

Are there multiple flags that you need? Do you need to test lots of them at the same time? If so, maybe SET with FIND_IN_SET() or INT with bit operators would be better.